A Confidential Source (2 page)

But how the hell did Leonard know who I was? From that one interview at the bike-a-thon fund-raiser? Was my voice, a bit raspy,
that distinct? Or had I given myself away by quoting the newspaper too often?

I’d hung up as soon as he said my name. But it didn’t matter; he’d cut to a commercial. Oh, why on earth did I always give
in to my impulses? Why did I have to call every frigging night?

A thousand square miles of land is just too small for a state. Rhode Island should be annexed to Massachusetts. The cultures
merged. Everyone in Providence could listen to Boston radio shows instead.

Finally, after several dozen vows to never call talk radio again, I decided there was nothing left to do but go to sleep.
I flipped off the light switch and headed toward the bedroom, but moonlight still illuminated the apartment. And as I crossed
the living room, my glance caught a little rectangle pushed to the edge of the kitchen bar: the evening’s forgotten scratch
ticket.

What the hell, I thought, maybe I’d win a million dollars and not have to worry anymore about being an idiot. I picked up
the ticket and took it back with me to the moonlit window. The Green Poker game, a lime-green card with a leprechaun holding
a hand of cards. Scratching off the latex was tough, as if the ticket had been hanging around on the store shelf for too long,
but I stuck with it. The leprechaun, as it turned out, was holding a pair of queens.

I began scratching the hand dealt me. The first square revealed the number 3 with a clubs symbol under it.

It figured.

The second square, scraped swiftly, was an improvement, a queen of diamonds. Predictably, the next two squares were major
duds, a five of spades and an eight of clubs. With little hope, I scratched off the last little square.

A queen of hearts. A match. A pair, or in the Rhode Island lottery’s new Green Poker game parlance, a lucky lady two of a
kind. It was only fifty bucks, but in that moment, a gigantic win.

Rhode Island could keep its statehood.

This time of year, when there wasn’t any risk of hitting beach traffic, the bureau office in South Kingstown was about twenty-five
minutes from my apartment in Providence. The office was in one of those sunny little strip malls where you can park your car
so close to the plate-glass window that you have the occasional urge to drive through, right to your desk.

I was the first one in and had to hunt for the key in the bottom of my canvas knapsack so I could unlock the door. The
Providence Morning Chronicle’s
newsroom is in a big building in the heart of the city, but the paper has these modest little local bureaus throughout the
state. The idea is that the community likes to see its reporters, likes to have somewhere nearby to drop off the PTA press
release and the high school sport scores. The South Kingstown office, wedged between Surfside Realty and Poppy’s Lunch, was
a narrow alley of three desks and two computers in a room with bright-white walls and marbleized linoleum.

Some days, I wondered what the hell I was doing in this empty little insurance agency of an office, what I was doing in Rhode
Island at all. After I’d left the
Ledger
in Boston, I’d told myself I’d never go back to reporting, never trust myself, my emotions, again. But after three years
of drifting from public relations to insurance research to cocktail waitressing, here I was starting all over again at a small
bureau, at a smaller paper, in what has turned out to be an incredibly small state.

I had a mountain of debt from this chronic employment instability, including a sizable loan from my mother I desperately needed
to repay. But it could be worse, I reminded myself as I put the key in the lock and swung open the door: I could still be
serving cosmopolitans.

From the pavement, I grabbed the stack of the day’s
Chronicles
and took them inside. I put them on the raised Formica counter that guarded the entrance. The stack could be seen through
the plate-glass window, and often people walked in off the street asking if they could buy a paper. Oddly enough, because
of union restrictions, we had to tell them no, directing them to Poppy’s Lunch next door or the pharmacy at the far corner
of the strip mall.

I went to my desk and threw my jacket around the back of the chair and my knapsack onto the floor. In the bottom-right-hand
drawer of my desk, there was a piece of marble decorated with a bronze quill and an old-fashioned inkwell. It was an award
I’d won for investigative reporting on the Tejian profile, the last big story I’d done for the
Ledger.
Most days, I kept the drawer shut.

I sat down with the phone and a notebook, calling local dispatchers to make the daily police and fire checks. Our office covered
South Kingstown, Narragansett, and North Kingstown, which were all beach communities. It was generally pretty quiet in the
off-season. The best I could hope for was a brawl at a keg party at the University of Rhode Island.

The big news of the morning was a Dumpster fire in the parking lot of the Ro-Jack’s supermarket. As I was transmitting the
five-inch story to Providence, the front door scraped open and Carolyn Rizzuto, my bureau manager and boss, walked in.

“Hi,” she said, distractedly sorting through a stack of envelopes in her hand. She was often distracted in the mornings. Although
she was only eight years older than I was, we were lifetimes apart. At forty-three, she’d had two marriages, two divorces,
and two daughters whom she was now raising alone.

She stood over me, a bag of Poppy’s bagels under her arm and a funny smile on her face.

“What?”

She dropped the envelope on my desk. “This was stuck in the mail slot, didn’t you see it?”

I shook my head. Addressed to Hallie Ahern in Magic Marker, the envelope had no postal marking.

Carolyn breezed past me, taking off her coat, dyed-blue leather, which she hung up in a closet instead of tossing over her
chair. Then she began slicing open two bagels on a cutting board beside the coffee machine. “You wanna peanut butter and cream
cheese?” she asked, her back toward me as she began to forage inside our little ice cube of a refrigerator.

“No, just plain, please,” I replied, tearing open the envelope. Inside was a handwritten note on WKZI stationery.

Dear Hallie,

Sorry I screwed up on your name last night. Please don’t stop calling the show.

Leonard

I slipped the note into my top drawer as Carolyn approached my desk.

“That’s why you look the way you do,” Carolyn said, putting the bagel down in front of me on a paper towel.

She said this almost every morning and when I forgot to pick up cookies on the afternoon tea run. Carolyn was what you would
call a full-figured woman, not fat, but with a good-size chest and hips that would not slim no matter how many aerobics classes
she took at lunchtime. I ran every morning at dawn, which tended to keep the weight off, but I was still in need of full-scale
renovation.

“Have you seen those new bras at Victoria’s Secret? Very natural looking,” Carolyn would say with a glance at my boyish figure.
“Even under a T-shirt.”

“Shoes can make a very big difference,” she’d say, showing me a Nine West catalog. “And better jewelry.” She didn’t think
the small silver half-moons I wore in my ears even counted as jewelry.

And then, just last week, as if she’d been giving this an enormous amount of thought, she’d said, “A little azure shadow at
the crease and under the arch and you’d be amazed by how blue your eyes can be.” She peered at me a little closer. “After
you tweeze those brows, of course.”

She was such a true believer in beauty, so committed to my transformation, that I couldn’t get mad about it. And she was right
about the eyebrows.

The phone rang and Carolyn picked it up. By the sound of the conversation, it had something to do with her older daughter’s
habit of forgetting her homework. I took a bite of my bagel and tried to chew. Leonard must have hand-delivered the note last
night on his way home from the station. Why had he gone to such trouble?

“Okay, I’ll drive it over at lunchtime,” Carolyn said. “But this is the
last, the absolute last
time.” She slammed the phone into the cradle and seethed in silence. Then she turned to me. “You are so lucky you don’t have
kids.”

I nodded, noncommittally. There were only the two of us permanently assigned to this bureau, and sometimes, when I had to
cover for her because the kids were sick or had to be driven somewhere, my child-free status worked in my favor. Other times,
Carolyn seemed to resent me for it.

“That
friend
of yours coming to stay tonight?” she asked.

She meant Walter. He was my sponsor, a friend I’d met at substance-abuse meetings who’d helped me kick the sleeping pills
my doctor had prescribed after my brother, Sean, died. Walter drove a cab in Boston but slept on my futon now and then when
he had a late-night gig playing guitar in Providence.

“Yes.” I felt it necessary to add, “He’s engaged to a good friend of mine.”

Carolyn shrugged in a manner that suggested that was no barrier. From what she’d told me about her personal life, I’d gathered
that she hadn’t hesitated to break up a marriage or two. Once, she’d fixed me up with one of her ex-husband’s coworkers, who,
it turned out, wasn’t yet divorced. “Oh, please, it’s just a matter of time. They’re in couples counseling,” she’d said afterward.
“And you know how that goes.”

There was really no use explaining again that Walter was a surrogate brother. Carolyn didn’t seem to understand the parameters
of a platonic relationship.

She dropped into her chair and booted up her computer. Even though she professed to despise all office politics, first thing
every morning she dialed Providence and called up the newspaper’s in-house gossip file.

The
Chronicle
used its bureaus much like major-league baseball used its farm teams. The occasional “star reporter” might get hired away
from a smaller paper right into the downtown newsroom, but most new recruits were assigned to these little bureaus across
the state, where they were expected to prove themselves before getting promoted into the city. Bureau managers like Carolyn
were former reporters who had developed “management potential” and thus had to cut their teeth as bosses in a bureau before
being taken seriously as candidates for a news-editor or department-editor job downtown. Just like in the minor leagues, some
would never make it to the pros. And many bureau managers, like Carolyn, claimed an outright preference for the more autonomous
hinterlands.

But whether it was involuntary or by choice, working in the relative isolation of a bureau helped whet an inordinate appetite
for in-house gossip. Even the new reporters who hadn’t met each other wanted to know who was getting married or having a baby.
But more important, we wanted to know who was getting praise from the editors, who was getting the choice assignments, and
who had the inside track into the city.

Today, though, I had more pressing interests. Opening my drawer to peek at the note, I could make out the big
L,
the hard slant of Leonard’s signature on the bottom of the paper. I shut the drawer when Carolyn abruptly turned around.

“Susannah Rodman is leaving the paper for the
New York Times,
” she said, looking fierce and sad and angry. Even though Carolyn swore she had no interest in a promotion to an editorial
job downtown, let alone in leaving the state of Rhode Island, I instantly recognized what she was feeling.

“Big deal,” I said.

“Big fucking deal,” Carolyn amended.

We were silent, internally reeling from how big a deal it really was. From the
Providence Morning Chronicle
to the
New York Times
—not too many reporters made that kind of leap.

“It was her investigative work on the superior court judges a few years back,” Carolyn said at last. “She was on that team
that won the Pulitzer.”

I had never met Susannah Rodman, couldn’t tell you if she was tall or short, or maybe the nicest person in the entire world.
But for a single moment, I hated her.

“You know,” Carolyn said, giving me a sly, sideways look. “They’ll need someone to replace her downtown on the investigative
team.”

When I took this job, I’d promised myself that I’d devote myself exclusively to small-town community reporting, that I’d stay
in a quiet little bureau, away from the kind of high-profile investigative stories that could chew up your life and force
you into no-win decisions. But the truth was, I was bored out of my mind with school committees and garden clubs. And even
though this wasn’t the
Boston Ledger,
Rhode Island was a petri dish of bizarre stories. The investigative reporters who dug them up were awarded Pulitzers and
sent off to the
New York Times.

I choked back the ambition in my throat and tried to make it sound as if it were hypothetical. “You think they’d even consider
me?”

T
HE MAZURSKY MARKET
was always busy at the dinner hour. Usually, I didn’t mind. Working in South Kingstown in the off-season was especially lonely:
the highway devoid of cars, the sidewalks and shops practically empty. Back in the city, I was often relieved to be standing
elbow to elbow with other people.

But tonight, I was hoping it would be quiet so I could get a few minutes with Barry, the owner. He was always at the register
when I stopped in at night and was the closest thing to a friend I’d made in Providence. He’d steered me to the Green Poker
scratch-ticket game and would be excited about my $50 win.

I’d caught the tail end of the dinner rush. It was raining outside, and the store steamed with warm people. The line at the
register was three deep and Barry was in rote mode, eyes fixed on price stickers as he scanned them into his machine. On really
slow nights, he had two different newspapers in front of him, the radio playing in the background, and a lit cigarette in
a makeshift ashtray. Knowing I worked for the
Chronicle,
he was always asking me what was the latest from the mayor’s office. He refused to believe I wasn’t privy to inside information.
“Just let me know when he’s going to raise my taxes,” he always said.